


wooden horses and spartan soldiers

by zombeesknees



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 10:28:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16931574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombeesknees/pseuds/zombeesknees
Summary: A history class can be the perfect opportunity to learn something important. | Written for/winner of Challenge 4 at then_theres_us on LJ many moons ago.





	wooden horses and spartan soldiers

History had never been her favorite subject. Memorizing dates had seemed pointless. Keeping track of lines of succession was boring. Why should she care at all about battles that had been fought two thousand years ago?

But when the Doctor took her back to those battles, introduced her—Dame Rose of the Powell Estate—to those kings and queens, she realized she should have paid more attention in class. 

So she asked him for lessons. Just some brush-up classes to refresh her memory before they jumped straight into some religious schism in 1220 Germany, or found themselves accused of witchcraft in Salem, or in the middle of a stand-off between the Spanish and Portuguese armadas in 1645. 

They were going over Greek history tonight, papers strewn about and a map unrolled on the table in the library. Rose sat with a lined notebook before her, trying to take notes while occasionally tapping on her teeth with the end of her pen. 

The Doctor was rambling about how the Greeks hadn’t actually made a wooden _horse_ to sneak into Troy; it had been a wooden _wolf_ , which was especially symbolic because King Priam had been approached by a wolf when he was a small boy—but the beast had left the boy in peace, fulfilling a prophecy from the Oracle of Delphi. And so the Greeks had made a wooden wolf in order to make their gesture at conciliation appear genuine, and of _course_ Priam couldn’t have rejected such a symbolic gift, could he? Homer could be forgiven his small mistakes; he was, after all, a blind drunk with a habit for embellishment.

Rose felt her mind wandering. Whenever anyone mentioned Troy, she couldn’t help but imagine all of the movie adaptations she’d seen with unrealistic CGI and beefy Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt in stereotypical brush-topped helmets.

Now the Doctor had moved over to the chalkboard and was drawing up the simple yet effective plan King Leonidas—a _remarkably_ hairy man, you couldn’t tell where his eyebrows ended, and how that man could down the mulled wine!—had executed with his three hundred Spartans to defend the pass at Thermopylae.

She knew the Battle of Thermopylae was important. She could remember Mrs. Myrtle citing it as the battle that saved democracy. But really, could anything so simple as a single battle be attributed such a huge, far-reaching result? Could anything that world-changing be boiled down, pinned down, traced back to a single moment?

The Doctor was looking at her with interest, and she realized she’d said the last thought aloud. She struggled to explain herself, to marshal her thoughts into something that at least _sounded_ intellectual. The Doctor was smiling slightly, just the faintest of quirks at the corner of his mouth, and she felt herself flushing red in embarrassment. Moments like these, when the subject at hand had something to do with science or maths or history, Rose remembered just how immature and simple she must seem to him. He had 900 years of knowledge, a brain far superior to hers, the ability to see all of time and space at any given moment—how childish she must seem when she tried to discuss something that he clearly knew twenty times better.

And so she shut her mouth and looked down at the table, struggling with the blush burning on her face. But then the Doctor wiped away the chalk on the board, pulled off his bookish glasses, and sat down across from her. 

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “There are very, very, very few things in the entirety of space and time that can be traced back to a single moment. A decisive battle. A specific piece of legislature. The universe doesn’t work like that. Every choice made splinters reality into a dozen different universes; you know that. And with so many variables at work, how can one thing be called a turning point?”

Then he swept aside the map and papers and took one of her hands in his. He leaned against the table, his arm outstretched and his thumb brushing along the back of her hand, and when she met his eyes she thought she saw a whisper of tears in them. For a moment, it wasn’t just the Doctor looking at her—it was both of them, the lonely one with big ears and the weight of the universe on his shoulders _and_ the manic one she had come to love more than any other man in the universe. 

“But some things _can_ be pinned down as turning points. Some battles, some decisions, some moments truly shape the rest of the universe. Some of them are so simple and so seemingly insignificant that historians can’t see them. _Those_ are the moments that change _everything_ , and they can hardly be recorded in textbooks.”

“Really, Doctor?”

“Yes. I can think of one right now. In England—London, to be precise—about two years ago. A brilliant girl got into a silly blue box with a man she didn’t even know. A simple, slightly mad decision, a leap of faith with the promise of adventure and a life more than ordinary... And look how things have changed. How the universe has changed. How she has changed. How that man has changed.”

When he looked at her like that, with all of his gratitude and satisfaction and glee and an emotion he had never fully given words to written plain across his face, she felt her heart hesitate in its syncopated rhythm. _She was important, she had changed the universe._ And he was proud of her. She meant the world to someone, and not just anyone: she meant the world to the most important man in the universe. She knew there were tears in her eyes, and she wrapped her other hand around his, tightened her grip as if he were her lifeline (and he was, really, wasn’t he?) and held on for dear life.

“If you’d been born in Greece two thousand years ago, Rose Tyler,” the Doctor said in the hush that followed. “There would have been a _million_ ships bound for Troy.”


End file.
